Retrospectives from Hell

Sebastian Lang

Josef Scherer, Gitte Klitgaard Hansen, Kai Simons, Simon Roberts, Sebastian Lang, Aino Corry,

As the purpose of this session changed from the time when I proposed it (on Monday) til I finally did it (Thursday), I would like to share the WHY and my depending insights:

* The initial purpose was indeed to offer a session to share fail stories of retrospectives and for example create in a playfull approach (using the Innovationgames(R) Technique 'My Worst Nightmare') some retrospective from hell (a nightmare of a retrospective) to extract in the depending debriefing some helpull hints, by flipping the 'negative' ideas. In this context I like the quote (sorry I forget from whom #sorrybadnamememory), “If you can aggravate a situation, then you can also improve it” - and as it seems to be more easy for most ppl to think negatively, I like the power of this Innovation Game, especially when the debriefing is used to flip the negative ideas in challanging positive ideas or questions …

As timed passed by very fast and I was attracted by some overlapping / colliding topics, I shifted this session to Wednesday afternoon. Doing so, I was able to join the session “Solutions focused on a daily basis” proposed by Cyril (See: http://www.retrospectivefacilitatorgathering.org/doku.php/we2.1), which was mindblowing for me and made me rethink about the purpose of my own session. Someone mentioned during this session: “The only retrospective we need in the solution focused approach is the finding: “Shit happens, so now let's look at the future / solutions …” ⇒ So somehow my session proposal looked silly for myself - somehow destructive and not solution focused …

* So the new purpose of the session I had in mind now, was to use it to somehow reflect on my own fails (my personal retrospectives from hell) and get some feedback on that from the potential participants. The problem was: I was not shure how to do this. Initially I thought about describing and sharing my own observations and asking for feedback, but I struggeled how to do this in a session and get prepared for it. To be honest I had some growing fear to run this session, so the main focus / ideas for the session was: Lets use some empathy maps (Gamestorming Technique) to brainstorm on the different point of views (of the facilitator and the participants) … and get prepared on a very structured approach (by writing a story) … as usual … falling back to my strange pattern of over planning & over structuring #fail

So this is what I prepared beforehand the session:

As I said I had some fear to run this session, because I had postponed it several times, I was struggling with myself and I was not shure either what to expect. As I felt unsecure I automatically falled back to my own bad habbit of overplanning a meeting and maybe did the best thing I could. In the first 5 minutes after I introduced this session and agenda poster, I felt myself exactly in this uncomfortable situation I was sometimes in retrospectives or other meetings, when my plan was not working and my sensors got the feedback (from the audience), that something is going wrong. At such moments my body language normally changes and my internal heat is growing and I start sweating. I am not saying, that I could not handle this, or I did not change my plans then, but I felt uncomfortable and I guess the audience realized that. Anyhow, as the same effect happens in this session, I tried to use it as some kind of shared 'check in' experience, we could analyse / talk about in the session. So we did:

I introduced the Gamestorming Technique 'Empathy Map' (Details see: http://www.gogamestorm.com/?p=42) and we did some brainstorming on the question: “What is the facilitator / participant of a retrospective seeing, hearing, saying/doing and thinking at the moment a retrospective is going to fail?” (The participants could choose my lousy session start or some own experiences …)

Here are the results (yes, we did not use the graphical version of the Empathy Map - mea culpa)

Afterwards we did some debriefing on the findings and talked about some additional topic (blogpost), that puzzled me (in a positive way):

- The “Top 5 Scrum Workshop Dont's” (See: http://agileanarchy.tumblr.com/post/20795405232/top-5-scrum-workshop-donts)

I realized, that these dont's exactly summarized all my fails, and suddenly it was clear to me, why I failed and felt so uncomfortable. So thx to the blog-post author 'Tobias Mayer' (http://agileanarchy.tumblr.com/aboutme) for this great insight …

So at the end of this session we talked about these Scrum Workshop don'ts and how to apply / understand them in the context of retrospectives.

Thx to all participants of this session, that helped me a lot to reflect on my own fails :) - Finally I was learning - HOW FASCINATING \o/